RECORDINGS: ALLA BREVE

"THE FIRST NOWELL." Robert DeCormier Singers and Ensemble. DeCormier, conductor. Arabesque Digital 6526. DeCormier has taken Christmas carols out of the church and placed them in the medieval courtyard. These familiar songs sparkle with Elizabethan sounds of guitar, flute and harp; they ring with a Renaissance harmony that emphasizes octaves, fourths, and fifths. But in reaping these profits, DeCormier also pays a price. Nowhere in the disc does his performance attain that Victorian grandeur that his teacher, Robert Shaw, has bestowed on these same carols.